I concluded my previous post by observing
that all too often innovations that make considerable initial impact are often
followed by a period of sustained retrenchment during which the benefits are
eroded. In this post, I want to develop that thought by looking at thinking
which took place largely in Japanese industry in the middle of the twentieth
century.
I have just been re-reading a book that I
first read in the 1990s, Masaaki Imai’s Kaizen,
the Key to Japan’s Competitive Success (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1986).
A very simple, but important, diagram
appears on page 7. It is highly applicable to current debates about improvement
and quality in children’s services and child protection. You can find many
examples of this diagram on-line. Here is one example.
Kaizen (pronounced Ky’zen) is a Japanese word which roughly translates as
‘improvement’. According to Imai, Kaizen
is one of three functions that any business or organisation needs to carry out
to produce goods or services which fully meet the needs of end-users, the other
two of which are Innovation and Maintenance.
Imai thinks that typically Western
organisations (especially manufacturers of the 1980s and before) recognised the
importance of only Innovation and Maintenance, while Kaizen was initially conceived and developed in Japan.
‘Maintenance’ is a self-explanatory
concept. Imai defines it as “… activities directed toward maintaining current
technological, managerial and operating standards” (op. cit. page 5). In
contrast ‘Innovation’ is about replacing those standards with new, and
hopefully better, ones. Innovation concerns what are often ‘drastic’ changes
resulting from significant investments in technology, equipment or working
practices.
Imai argues that those Japanese
manufacturing companies which took the world by storm in the 1960s and 1970s
did so because they practiced Kaizen in addition to Maintenance and
Innovation. In contrast to Innovation, Kaizen
concerns small improvements which result not from large developments driven by
senior management but from the activities of all employees “… as a result of
on-going efforts” (op. cit. page 6). Whereas Innovation has traditionally been
conceived as the responsibility of senior and middle management, while
Maintenance is largely the province of workers and supervisors, Kaizen involves everybody at every level
in the organisation working together to identify, co-ordinate and implement
small scale improvements on a regular basis.
Imai does no disparage Innovation. Rather
he believes that it must be complemented by Kaizen
in bringing about improvement. Innovation involves periodic step-changes, while
Kaizen is a continuous process which
happens all the time. The effects of Kaizen
are small-scale in the short-term, but cumulate to significant improvements
over time. While Innovation is unpredictable, often depending on technological breakthroughs, Kaizen is gradual but constant.
A visual representation of Innovation +
Maintenance looks like a staircase, but with the treads sloping downwards as
the breakthrough improvements (innovations)
are eroded overtime; maintenance is never perfect. In contrast a visual representation of Innovation + Kaizen + Maintenance has the staircase treads
sloping upwards. In between innovations standards are incrementally raised by Kaizen activities.
Imai believes that Kaizen implies everybody being involved in identifying needs for
improvement which in turn involves identifying problems which need to be
solved. These may concern very small parts of the overall process, such as the
way work passes between different teams or the accuracy or reliability of a particular
business process or machine. In a service context, what may be at issue are problems
relating to seemingly trivial service components, such as the way a form is
completed or how a telephone enquiry is handled. As each problem is solved, so
the overall operation improves little by little resulting in sustained gains in
productivity and quality.
Imai provides an excellent table (Figure
2.1, page 24) contrasting Kaizen and
Innovation. Important virtues of Kaizen,
in contrast to Innovation, are that it involves everyone at all levels in the
organisation, is ‘collectivist’ as opposed to ‘individualistic’, is orientated
around people rather than technology and works well when financial and other
resources are in short supply.
I hope that by now the implications for
children’s services and child protection are beginning to become clear. If
Western manufacturing companies have in recent years moved on from those attitudes
and practices described by Imai in the 1980s, the same is not true of the types
of organisations which deliver services to children in countries like Britain
today. In England, many local authority children’s services departments still
function as traditional bureaucracies in which management imposes policies and
procedures on workers whose primary responsibility is to maintain standards, or else face discipline from employers or criticism
from external bodies like Ofsted. Change has traditionally been driven from the
top down as a result of small groups of influential people deciding which
innovations should take place. The Every Child Matters reforms of the early 2000s were precisely of this type, with
all sorts of new structures and systems being imposed as a result of ‘learning’
from enquiries, research and feedback from small groups of influential players.
Since 2010, change has been less formally
packaged, but equally driven top-down. Recent initiatives regarding adoption and
social worker accreditation, for example, have appeared from the Department for
Education (DfE) with little or no connection to what are perceived to be
priorities by those working on the front line. The Department has funded an
‘Innovation Programme’, the operation and scope of which is far from clear to
the vast majority of people working in the field. There is an ever-present
danger that the results of some innovation ‘pilots’ will be unthinkingly
imposed across the board with limited consultation.
At the same time, the lot of most workers
in child protection and other children’s services functions in England is to do
the day job, while maintaining standards in difficult circumstances. The norm
is for them not to be involved in questions of how to bring about change and
improvement, however gradual. Change and innovation has been reserved for
‘experts’ – Ofsted inspectors, DfE officials, senior managers, policy wonks and
academics. And those who have direct up-to-date experience of the daily
delivery of services (front line workers) have been conveniently left outside
the loop!
If only we
could begin to practice Kaizen in children’s services and child protection! Even in the absence of successful
innovation, services would become more effective and efficient as a result of
continuous and incremental small scale improvements. And, in the absence of new
investment and new resources, services would continue to improve, driven by the
daily learning of frontline workers and their supervisors.
It would, however, be a mistake to see this
as an easy task, because what is required is a shift in culture from top-down
to bottom-up. Rather than instructing workers how they can work better, senior
managers have to recognise that it is time to begin thinking of ways to listen
to those who do the work and to engage with them in building better services.
For many at the top, such a change of focus could be painful.
Imai and the Japanese industrialists who
introduced Kaizen operated in a
manufacturing context. There are, however, no reasons to think that continuous
improvement cannot happen in services, even complex professional services such
as child protection. If every worker was able to spend just a few minutes each
day thinking of ways to improve the service (less bureaucracy, more
value-added, fewer mistakes, quality improvements), and if workers’ suggestions
for improvement were taken seriously by managers and acted upon, huge numbers
of small improvements would amass in a relatively short period of time. Rather
than standing still or, more likely, going backwards since the last innovation,
small scale improvements would cumulate to lasting beneficial changes. And that
would serve child and young people well.
